A detailed introduction on how fonts are shown in current Unix-like systems. From the nixer and author of 2bwm.

By the way, I’m having a hard time sticking with a definitive font to use, mainly because most of the bitmaps I like (dina, scientifica, curie, terminus, uw-ttyp0) are not narrow enough and the two vector fonts I really like, Luculent and Iosevka, do not look good on my T410s default screen with a dpi of 96. Luculent is close to be a winner, but when antialias is on it looks weird on st but looks amazing on Emacs at all sizes, though autohint looks very good for both. Disabling antialias and autohint does the trick on st, but on Emacs, bold, italic and bold-italic variants are still rendered with antialias on (an Emacs’ problem that I haven’t been able to solve).

I would certainly appreciate some suggestions on any of my problems. Except shooting the machine or buying a new thinkpad with higher DPI (which is on my wishlist nonetheless).

I used DejaVu Sans Mono for a long time as my terminal font, because it was the default on my system. Earlier this week though I switched to Inconsolata, and I find that I am personally finding it more pleasant to look at when doing console activities (although that may just be the novelty of a new font after staring at the same one for so long).

I like serif fonts, but it’s find to hard a monospaced serif font that isn’t in the Courier family or (blatantly) inspired by it. For now, I’m using Luxi Mono as my terminal font, but it’s not perfect; stuff like Cyrillic support is spotty.